I recently read an article entitled Who Killed Long Copy. It was an excerpt from Read me: Ten Lessons on Creating Great Copy. There was a sentence that really made me think: “It’s ironic that the one place where long copy really has fallen out of favour is advertising, the industry that invented copywriting in the first place.”

I work at OgilvyOne. David Ogilvy was the daddy of long copy; his Man in the Hathaway shirt and the Man from Schweppes is here are two of the most iconic long copy ads ever written.

So are we continuing his legacy today? Yes, is the short copy answer. The advertising industry has evolved, as consumer habits and media consumption have. The good agencies and the good copywriters are still writing beautiful and engaging long copy. But it’s in the form of letters, emails and well-crafted online content, telling a bigger, on-going story that lives and grows over time, through multiple touch points, across a customer’s entire relationship with a brand.  

But just because long copy is still used doesn’t mean this once integral tool of the marketing arsenal is thriving.

From my perspective, as someone who runs an agency, it is definitely getting harder to find people who can come up with engaging ideas and then craft the copy that fills those ideas. 

The main cause of this has to be in our education system. Add in a societal shift from the days when the media set a good example (now it seems good grammar is a bad thing) and a lack of time for anything other than “snackable” content, and this has contributed to the view that long copy ads have become old-fashioned. Creativity has come to be associated with brevity and a belief in advertising, that all persuasion should reside in a single proposition, usually expressed in a sentence. And that this single thought, if continuously repeated in some creative form, will do 100% of the job of selling. 

But this sits at odds with us. We are after all a social species; we need stories not only to encourage us to buy something, but to explain to our friends why we are clever to buy it. Reading, is a very late evolutionary development among humans, but talking and storytelling are millions of years old. They are what make us human. Cavemen would gather around camp-fires to exchange stories, the Greeks revelled in the myths of ancient heroes and gods – and now storytelling is intrinsic to us. We are a species of storytellers. 

Long copy has moved on with the industry, but the craft and skill involved remains the same. Now long copy is the bard that ensures the brand’s story is told across multiple communication channels, successfully binding together the different chapters of the brand’s story.

As an industry we must nurture and cherish this craft. This means working with clients, some of whom are guilty of critiquing every word of long copy, which make the process of getting approval unbelievably time consuming and frustrating. David Abbott famously switched to posters to advertise The Economist partly because of his frustration at the publication’s approval process. Investment also plays a key role in helping to encourage the use of long copy.  

Agencies need to invest to develop talent, especially as good copywriters are outnumbered by those who can’t write well. Or they can, but they find it hard work – which, to be fair, it is.  More importantly, we need to champion longer copy again. Despite the lack of recognition (long copy ads do not win awards – at least not international ones) we need long copy to be able to give meaning and context. To convey the messages we want to communicate. And tell the brand stories we want shared.

As guardians of this craft, we need to do more to promote it and make sure that it is not lost. Otherwise, as ad people, where would we be?

Jo Coombs is the managing director at OgilvyOne London

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